Download The Myths of `Value

Steve D'Alton
The myths of 'value-free' sociology
SOCIOLOGISTS STILL CLING to a definition of reality which
assumes that causal connections can be m ade from a base definable
in purely empirical terms. It is this myth of objectivity and
scientific value-free precision which guides much sociological
theorizing. In 1744 Vico placed these assumptions in doubt
when he argued that mathematics did not record the inner nature
of things but was rather the product of the human mind and was,
in effect, true only of itself and not beyond itself. He argued
that mathematics bears no one-to-one relationship with physical or
‘natural’ systems, as these have their own rationale independent
of the actions of men and unknowable in human cognitive terms.
This does not imply that humans may not efficiently order physical
units to produce desired results, which obviously can be done,
but emphasises that ‘efficient use of’ does not constitute knowledge
of nature.
Vico also argues that what man makes is, or can be, understood
by man because he himself makes it. Thus history is, in principle,
knowable with a much higher degree of accuracy than is any system
Steve D 'A lton is a lecturer in sociology at the U niversity of NSW. T h is article
is the slightly am ended version of a p a p er delivered at th e Congress of the
Sociological Association of A ustralia and New Zealand held in B risbane in July.
D ue to a m isunderstanding, only Steve D 'A lto n ’s nam e app eared on th e article
"Ideology — a Static D efinition of R eality" w hich was p ublished in the last
issue of A L R . T h e article should also have carried the nam es of co-authors
M arika M uhlen-Schulte a n d M ichael B ittm an. T h e e rro r is regretted.
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A U STR A LIA N L E F T REVIEW — SEPTEM BER, 1V71
studied by the physical scientists. A significant implication of
this approach is that the use of mathematical reasoning which is
appropriate to natural sciences is, when applied to the understanding
of society, absolutely inappropriate. Here mathematics implants
a method geared to partial understanding and efficient manipulation
onto a subject of study which may be fully understood and all
embracing. It is the methodology which distances the analyst from
the system to be analyzed and thus makes opaque what is
potentially transparent. M athematical precision, therefore, serves
as a mystification that prevents real interaction of the social
observer in society and affirms the separation of society and man.
This guiding myth, which also finds expression in economics
and psychology, serves to force irrelevance onto what are vital
human subjects. Objectivity divorces the observer from the thing
observed and precise mathematical formulation of the thing observed
divorces the abstract formulation from its own active expression.
Thus, the whole enterprise is one which alienates, is grounded on
alienating principles and affirms alienated methods.
It is the
distancing that divorces the observer from his own social environ­
ment and permits the reification of social processes by making them
static entities. Static entities which are related to the observer
in much the same way as physical objects are related to the
dispassionate research chemist. Thus ‘social engineering’ may be
manipulating methods for organising humans as machines for
abstract ends like ‘high production’ rather than for human ends
which might be ‘to hell with work like this’. ‘Value-freedom’ is,
in this context, the value of a specific ideological context, one
which affirms the status quo — capitalism and the accompanying
property ethic.
The alienation inherent in this process allows much of what is
socially significant to be ignored as ‘non-empirical’ or ‘value-?
oriented’ and enables the sociologist to avoid criticising or even
attempting to understand the society in which he operates. The
questions of m an’s meanings and purposes, his construction of
reality, beliefs and values can thus be ignored in favour of
microcosmic studies of abstracted model-men. Present technology
with its danger of ecological destruction and atomic catastrophe,
and overpopulation force a revision of the accepted principles ol
academic endeavour, and the ideological ground on which present
social theory rests is being criticised with increasing vigour. It
also highlights the responsibility of the individual social scientist
for the maintenance of particular constructions of reality, since the
criticism emphasises the essentially voluntary nature of all theorising.
T hat is, the relationships to be understood do not perm it of a
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single, unambiguous formulation of an inherent truth but require
a projection of order if they are to be made meaningful to the
observer. To the extent to which sociologists are iconoclastic and
dynamic, they are socially relevant in pointing to the gap between
what are socially prescribed possibilities and what is man’s potential.
To the extent to which sociology is conservative and static/
descriptive, it is limiting as it affirms a past condition as the
present condition.
All academic disciplines owe their existence and maintenance to
arbitrary distinctions constructed socially and maintained volun­
tarily. The boundaries of the disciplines are not givens to be
discovered but are affirmations by practitioners calling themselves
by the name of the discipline. Thus, the boundaries of sociology
are, in effect, what ‘sociologists’ choose to make them; they are
not prescribed beyond the practice of men. Sociology is not a
unitary perspective independent of sociologists but is a series of
perspectives each dependent on the individual so that each individual
is responsible for his own formulation of the meaning and relevance
of the study. The discipline exists in our consciousness, our
actions and our structuring of the universe. Of course each
individual sociologist has available to him a range of writings, and
his own construction of the subject m atter is, in part, dependent
on his particular experience of the contents of previous works.
But his totalisation of them is his own and he is uniquely respon­
sible for answering or attempting to answer the questions as to
what this totalisation is based on.
The view that suprapersonal forces are the deterministic arbiters
of m an’s actions, arbiters which have an absolute, knowable
construction that can be empirically verified is, in effect,- an
anti-heroic myth. This side of empirical positivism negates m an’s
voluntarism in favor of ‘natural’ or ‘social’ forces that are inde­
pendent, autonomous and omnipotent. The myth implicit in much
sociological theorising is not man the heroic, but society the heroic
‘super-force’. In contrast to this, sociologists should take as their
proper sphere of concern that of man, man-in-action, the praxis
of material men acting to produce their environment in a reflexive
interdependent complex, the resultant of which is man’s historical
affirmation of himself. Concern should therefore be with the
actions of man, his meanings and the context in which he lives.
Basic to this approach is concern with meaning. Rickmann
states: “In perception expressions are not given to us as expressions
— we only realise that what we perceive is an expression when we
grasp that it has a meaning”. It is on this level of meaning that
man constructs his universe, consequently the relevant epistemolo52
A U STR A LIA N L E F T R EVIEW — SEPTEM BER, 1971
gical conditions for understanding are concerned with the attribution
of meaning. It is a relative epistemology rather than an absolute
one which is congruent with understanding in the social sciences.
This approach does not deny that objects exist, but rather stresses
that it is the ordering of the meanings of objects which is the proper
sphere of social theories. These are essentially theories about
the way man relates to his social and object universe and to himself.
Of itself, data is meaningless until acted on by man, and the
attribution of meaning is the basic act of man projecting himself
and his construction onto his environment.
In this context, meaning and ideas are posited as an active
ordering of the universe. Vico, and later Marx, see ideas not as
clear and distinct mental definitions but as tools and weapons
(thus, for Marx, a theory can prove itself in action), as instruments
through which man gradually comes to himself and achieves his
humanity both individually and historically. Vico criticises the
abstract analytical method advocated by Descartes and suggests
that thinking, as it is experienced, follows a highly complicated
path of meaning, context and relevance and that analytical method
is not the form of thought but only a rare form of thought.
Understanding gained through this method is, consequently, a
partial understanding corresponding to the partial formulation of
the real as rational. Categorisation and rigidly oppositional
thinking has been criticised by a wide range of writers as making a
static, abstracted, partial, exclusive, unambiguous formulation of
what is a dynamic, holistic, ambiguous, inclusive reality. Categori­
sation requires that time be held as a constant, yet the attribution
of meaning by man is the active expression of man-iin-the-world, a
world where space and time are not independent unities but are
fully reflexive and interdependent.
The alternative approach emphasises the constant creation and
recreation of individual and social meaning through action on the
environment, so that history may be seen as ‘the advent of meaning’.
The present, in which individuals act, is always becoming. It is
not an unambiguous given, but an actively created project, grounded
in its own past and oriented to its own future. In this process,
it is the activity of man which is the constituting and integrating
element. It is in this sense that Marx can say ‘man makes
history’ and, together with Sorel, suggest that ‘the man who draws
up a program for the future is a reactionary’.
That is, the
program is drawn up in term s of its own past which will inevitably
be transcended in its active becoming. History is a human creation
and is the inescapable responsibility of humans because they
themselves have made it. It is what man has added to nature,
it is specifically human and can be blamed neither on God nor
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on the impersonal forces of nature. These are precisely Sartre’s
points when he argues that the dialectic is the mode of reasoning
most appropriate to the dynamic nature of social reality and his
formulation of the dialectic as totalisation, de-totalisation and
re-totalisation is an attempt to come to grips with the problem
of expressing a non-linear process in linguistic form, of providing
a mode of understanding appropriate to the process to be
understood.
Both the perspectives of teachers and the conventional methods
of analysis in sociology have been criticised recently by Roszak
(Dissenting Academy) and Blackburn (Student Power) while Chom­
sky has attacked the validity and use of rational argument in social
crises (American Power and the New Mandarins). But it appears
that the basic criticism is of the role ascribed to man by analysts
who are themselves playing the same alienated role suffered by
those they are studying. Criticism is aimed at those holding
partial, static, establishment views of the world, views that empiricise
man and abstract him from his humanness. Methodology has become
of param ount importance, a methodology ignorant of its own
presuppositions and grounded in a pseudo-scientific rationale of
‘objectivity’ that does not include a critique of its own value stance
but from which pronouncements about other value stances are
constantly made. Total involvement in methodological considera­
tions has had the effect of reducing analysis to particularised
description and divorcing it from the process described, alienating
form and content and implicitly justifying what is rather than
postulating what can or ought to be.
In the approach to sociological enquiry which emphasises man
as the focus of study, it is necessary to state the assumptions about
the nature of m an on which the analysis of social forms is based.
Because of the nature of social interaction as a process, analysis
concerned with truth in the Cartesian sense is not satisfactory.
F or this, as Vico argues, is a static construction, while science —
and especially social science — is really an inter^ubjective human
project whose principles are not to be found in things themselves
independent of human action, but rather ‘within the modifications
of our own mind’. He argues that m an acts in the world, makes
it human and in so doing, humanises himself. M arx also follows
this construction, claiming that the need for self-realisation in
man is accomplished through “the union of man with nature, the
realised naturalism of man and the realised humanism of nature”.
F or Dilthey, too, understanding rests on the recognition of ‘the I
in the thou’.
M an is consequently viewed both as creator and creation, as the
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A U STR A LIA N LE FT R EVIEW — SEPTEM BER, 1971
producer of his own conceptual universe and as the product of
his own projection. Concern for both sides of all interaction,
mediated through a process-definition of reality is an attem pt to
avoid reifying the form of social action into an ideal type, unidi­
mensional, static construction. Central to this approach is a view
of m an’s relatedness to the world, the interior and exterior condition
of his self. Marx supplies the key to understanding the dynamic
nature of man and states that the anterior condition of action
is need, the need to express oneself through the objects of the
environment, to act on the environment as a positive expression
of human creativity. It is not, therefore, simply environment action
on a passive receptor that is the condition of man, but it is the
expression of man through the environment that transforms both
the environment and man himself in a two-way process.
The
interior condition of man is need, the exterior condition of need
is praxis.
The formulation of need-*praxis as the condition of individual
action corresponds to Sartre’s definition of the dialectic where he
argues that m an and the environment (including other men) interact
in a continuous process. The individual perceives the environment
in terms of lack, that is, he projects a particular construction onto
the environment, a construction that orders it in terms of a felt
need. The praxis which corresponds to this ordering then organises
the external world as a means of fulfilling the need and in this
way man projects and actualises himself through the active attri­
bution of meaning which reflexively affects his consciousness.
Berger and Pullberg suggest that “to act means to modify the
figure of the given in such a way that a field is structured which,
to the actor, constitutes a meaningful totality” and it is this
process of the structuring of the environment by man that is
the projection of his meaning onto the world. However, at the
same time, the field to be structured contains of itself data and
is the material on which m an works and which faces man as both
the raw material and the result of his work. M an’s meaning,
mediated through its own actualisation returns to him as the
introjected* condition of external reality. Thus what was once
a meaningful ordering of the world in terms of need becomes
meaningless as the need is filled by the projected order, and each
particular formulation of m an’s need to express himself through
the world is detotalised by its own successful totalisation. There
is, consequently, a continuous process relationship between man
and the environment, where man realises himself through the world
and realises the world through himself. History is the stream
* In tro jectio n here m eans th e in co rp o ra tio n in to one's personality of a p a rticu la r
projected view w hich orders th e e n v iro n m en t—Ed.
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of such meaning actualisation and, as M erleau-Ponty suggests,
should not be divorced from philosophy as both history and
philosophy are m an’s creation and actualisation of meaning.
At this point it is tempting to reformulate the interaction
process simply in terms of m an’s consciousness of it, and this
is precisely what Hegel does when, in The Phenomenology of Mind
he suggests that m an is alienated and returns to himself only in
thought. M arx’s criticism of the Hegelian formulation is that this
“turns m an into the man of consciousness, instead of turning
consciousness into the consciousness of real men, living in the real
world” . When Hegel studies the alienated products of man he
takes them only in their abstract form and, in a sense, denies their
m aterial expression as real wealth, etc. But man is not alienated
by the spiritual essence of his produced objects; he is, as Lefebvre
says, “alienated by being temporarily dominated by a world that
is ‘other’ even though he himself gave birth to it”, and he suggests
that M arx’s critique of Hegel’s theory of alienation “opens the
way for a positive humanism which has to transcend and unite
idealism and materialism”.
M an is, once more, the focus, and it is man’s creation and
recreation of himself in the world of material objects and other
men that is the necessary ideal of understanding. Together with
this orientation towards man as self-creator goes the existential
emphasis on the freedom of choice. T hat is, each individual is
free to choose and, in good faith, perceives the choices. Unconscious
drives are merely those forces which the conscious mind knowingly
denies. The individual expresses himself under conditions of
need/ praxis and is himself manifest in action, one aspect of which
is choice. Thus not choosing is itself a choice not to choose
and is one choice among a range of possible choices. It is
therefore a uniquely human problem to be aware of the choices
and to have the responsibility attendant on any particular choice.
The process of choosing is an ongoing one which is at once the
condition of, and the limitation to, m an’s potentiality since action
requires that a choice be made and the ‘utility cost’ of this
alternative is the alternative foregone. This is what Sartre calls
the ‘kernel of unfreedom in freedom’ and is the condition of a
temporal existence. Husserl also emphasises the becoming nature
of man and advocates a concentration on experience as the proper
focus of study as this is the stimulus and response of man’s actions
in and through time.
Individual identity is, consequently, a constantly becoming
process, being formed and reformed, actively maintained or
changed; it is a unity of consciousness temporally linked with
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experience to experience. William James states: “It is but our
abstract conceptual thought that isolates and arbitrarily fixes
certain portions of this stream of consciousness”; it follows that
understanding of man in society requires a system of reason
appropriate to the unity of m an’s ever moving consciousness and
action, and the most satisfactory system seems to be dialectical
reason.
M an acts to constitute society and the society so constituted
reacts back onto man as the continuing expression of his manifest
praxis. Thus the present approach to man does not dehistoricise
him but makes him uniquely responsible for his social environment
and the perceived requirements of the environment. M an operates
in society to the extent that society operates in man, the whole
construction is a hum an creation and requires human action to
maintain the construction. Consequently, the whole social system
may be analysed as a process of projection and introjection, that
is, an active expression of m an’s creation. Every act constitutes
and reconstitutes the social system while categorisation of the
society as a ‘given’ corresponds to the arbitrary fixing of one
particular formulation as the formulation, as the social reality
and neglects the continuity and historical unity, the relational form
of which is temporality. Categorisation, in effect, emphasises the
spatial order and neglects the temporal, states a content devoid
of form. Formal logic is not an epistemology. The form of
society is process and therefore the content changes, so to
state one formulation as the formulation states a partial as a total
and divorces the society from man. Viewing society in process
terms it can be seen to operate only in and through man, the
active carrier and creator of the relations that make up the social
system; so man is posited as the central focus of study.
The anti-psychiatrists, notably Laing and Cooper, also add to
this approach to sociology. They emphasise context and view
the relation of individuals to others as a process of interchange
where each is constantly affected by and affects the other. They
emphasise the process and continuity of the interchange and
show how complete patterns of human interaction develop through
interpretation and reinterpretation of the other’s activity. However,
they also recognise the action of the subject in this interchange
situation, so that the action of the subject attendant on his
reinterpretation of the other, causes the other to reinterpret him
and modify his own behaviour accordingly. This is the basis of
a dynamic analysis of interpersonal relations where my action
passes from being my action for me to being my action for you,
‘from being mine for me it becomes other for the other’. There is,
consequently, a twofold problem in understanding social interchange.
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The first is the impossibility of experiencing the other’s experience.
The second part consists in the difficulty of comprehending a
context when one is a part of it, and where the very actions towards
understanding alter the context if for no other reason than that
they become a part of it. This indicates that I cannot predict
how you will experience me. I cannot be sure what my actions
mean for you and similarly I cannot tell what your actions mean
for me, as my understanding of you is mediated through my own
experience. What is obvious for me may not be at all obvious
for others.
Again, emphasis is on continuity, on process and on the unity in
movement of all action. Thus we return again to man as the
creator of his meanings, as the essential arbiter of his own universe.
When it neglects this action orientation and individual involvement
sociology falls into a determinist pattern which views the created
universe as if the creation is the supra-personal arbiter of man,
as if the society maintains itself rather than that man maintains
society. Society has meaning only to the extent to which it exists
and continues to exist in man’s consciousness and action. It is
an abstraction made real by man-in-action, but which is often treated
as an alien, for-itself entity beyond the construction of man.
Sociologists fail in their task of analysis when they are content
to treat the alienated fact as the given condition of man, when
they deny their own active role in the total social process.
References:
Berger, P. a n d L uckm an T .
Cooper. D.
Edie, J.M .
From m , E.
Laing, R .R . a n d Cooper, D.
Lefebvre, H.
L ym an a n d Scott
M arx, K.
R ickm an. H.P.
Vico. G.
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T h e Social C onstruction o f R eality,
A llen L ane P enguin 1968.
P sychiatry and A nti-P sychiatry,
T avistock, L ondon 1968.
Vico and E xistential P hilosophy,
B eyond the Chains o f Illusion,
Pocket Books Inc., N.Y., 1966
Reason and Violence,
T avistock, L ondon, 1966.
Dialectical M aterialism ,
C ape E ditions, L ondon, 1966.
Sociology of the A bsurd.
A ppleton C entury Crafts.
E conom ic and P hilosophic M anuscripts,
Foreign Languages P ublishing House.
Moscow, 1965.
U nderstanding and the H u m a n Studies.
H einem ann, London, 1967.
T h e N ew Science,
C ornell U niversity Press, 1948.
A U S TR A LIA N L E F T R EVIEW — SEPTEM BER, 1971